17 pages • 34 minutes read
At an Inn
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Themes
The Ideal Versus The Real
Though a love poem, Hardy’s initial focus on the serving staff at the inn is a critical element. Hardy uses the presence of the staff to symbolize the gap between the ideal and the real. At the emotional center of Hardy’s poem is the difference between what the serving staff at the inn perceives about the speaker and the companion and the reality of that relationship. The serving staff is especially attentive to the couple because they see “living love” (Line 10); they see “Love’s own pair” (Line 18); they feel the pair’s “love-light” (19). They are certain that the twosome meeting at the inn for a cozy rendezvous are most surely in love.
Their own lives uncomplicated by such emotions, the staff glorifies the couple’s dynamic. They see—or perhaps more accurately want to see—the couple as an embodiment of ideal love, the fantasy of pure and powerful love. The point of Hardy’s focus on the staff is that they have no idea who these two people are, these “strangers” (Line 1). The reality, as the closing two stanzas reveal, is quite different.
The poem uses the frame of the serving staff to symbolize how easily people conjure love from a desperate faith that such powerful “Love” (Line 18) with a capital L (as Hardy uses it) actually exists. What the serving staff does not have in their lives, they project onto the couple.
The Frustrating Irony of Love
In Romantic poetry, love is at once tender and genuine, simple and self-evident. Two people meet. They fall in love. The cosmos itself conspires to ensure that emotional yearning finds its expression. Hardy’s poem explores that need but finds that cosmic protocol ironic.
Here, the more certain the speaker is of the feelings in his heart, the more determined the cosmos seems to render that emotion at best useless. The speaker understands that the urgent longing they feel for their companion is something strong, but somehow is both something there, and not there, something real and not-real.
Hardy’s poem asks that if what the speaker feels is love, how could it go so terribly awry? There at the inn, when the couple had every opportunity and the perfect soundstage for a romantic interlude, why did it not work? And why did that urgent feeling finally clarify itself into love only when time and distance are between the two? At the inn, love was in the air, but it actually was not; now, love is not in the air, and yet it very much is. It is a perplexing reality that the speaker struggles to put into words: “As we seemed we were not / That day afar, / And we seem not what / We aching are” (Lines 33-36). Romance is an empty illusion, Cupid a malicious prankster, and love an illusion that cannibalizes any tender yearning heart.
The Inevitability of Existential Loneliness
“At an Inn” begins as a love poem—the inn’s waitstaff eager to create a fantasy night of love around the couple—but ends as a grim reminder of humanity’s essential loneliness. Love does not work. Love taunts. Love renders humanity’s noblest efforts a cruel joke. The poem closes on desperate wish. The speaker begs nothing less than the universe itself to allow them the chance to stand once again with the person they now know they love just once before they die: “[L]et us stand” (Line 39), they beg the universe, “[a]s we stood then” (Line 40)—that is, when we both dismissed that emotion.
Even the speaker understands the odds against the opportunity to rekindle a love they allowed to slip away. This universe allows no do-overs. The speaker sends out their closing plea into the same universe that has indifferently allowed them to discover how intimate feeling can be discovered through distance. He does not plea with the Christian God; after all the speaker and their beloved are married to others and the Church and the “laws of men” (Line 38) deny them a chance at happiness.
In the end, Hardy leaves his speaker—and presumably the speaker’s beloved—in the chill of an existential loneliness, aware finally of love but resigned to know the power of that love only by learning to live without it.
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By Thomas Hardy
